


A Wedding

by prizewinningfruitcake



Series: Smitten [5]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: City Elves, Established Relationship, F/M, Ferelden, Grey Wardens, King Alistair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 05:32:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16299035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prizewinningfruitcake/pseuds/prizewinningfruitcake
Summary: It's all over - supposedly. Warden Tabris and Alistair adjust to being heroes, or whatever it is you call them.





	A Wedding

For a moment, she thinks she’s dead, that it’s over. She’s blind from the flash, red staining the backs of her eyelids, dust clogging her airways. Senseless until she blinks and coughs and feels the stone reeling beneath her. She reaches for her hammer before she can think and finds its handle. 

He must have done what she asked, against all odds. Before the tower and the sickly green sky come back into focus, all she can see is his familiar face creased with hurt and disgust, a fever dream.

“If one of us is to die, it should be me,” she’d said, and he’d said, “Right. Because of all my _responsibilities_.”

A muddy voice in the roar says, “Oh, thank the Maker.” A pair of brown boots rushes towards her, and Zevran drops to his knees and says, “I thought you’d gone off the edge.” 

She follows his gaze, rotating her head on the stone to the ledge just beside her. Gingerly, she sits up and looks over. A few bodies on the ground, too far away to tell if they’re people or darkspawn. 

“That would’ve been funny,” she murmurs. She stumbles to her feet and takes stock of her limbs. Her neck hurts, one knee refuses to take any weight. Zevran offers an arm, and she leans on him; he is covered in blood, but seems relatively uninjured. 

“I found her,” Zevran announces. Wynne crouches over Alistair, a shimmer of magic surrounding them, and he darkens when he sees her. But still, they’re both alive. There must have been some feeling left in him.

“Are you hurt?” Wynne asks, looking her over. 

It started that day, that one evil day in Denerim. The day she saw the alienage was blocked off, and Alistair dragged her away because she was making a scene. He wanted to make another stop, and her head was elsewhere, looking at them like through a dirty window, Alistair and...that woman. The one he’d been with in the Fade.

“I’ll live,” she says to Wynne. “Are you-?” she gestures at Alistair, sitting on the ground.

“I’m fine,” he replies. He won’t be nasty to her in front of the others; at least he gives her that. 

It was creepy, his sister and all her children. Halsa watched them unsettled, half expecting them to turn into demons like before. She said something she regretted saying afterward, standing on the side of the road. “She’s just trying to get by, Al. She’s got no reason to care about you.” 

He’d only wanted some comfort, and she’d had none to give. He took it well; he only said, “You’re right, of course,” and she was. But something was different after that. 

Something was already different, not in the way she expected. The ring she’d kept, its weight gone from her pocket. She let him put it on her, tried to make it his.

Down below, the survivors are gathering. Cheering and hugging, drinking, weeping. They mob Alistair when he reaches them. He gives them his best smile, puts hands on shoulders, kneels down and talks to children. A few days ago, she told him he’d be a good king, and he’d said, “Go fuck yourself, Halsa.” He thought she was making fun of him.

She wasn’t. She looked at him in the Chantry at Redcliffe while he spoke with the Revered Mother, holding the ring Halsa’d given him from her pocket, and thought _he looks like a prince_. Like from a storybook. He smiled at her in her borrowed dress and her mother’s boots and said, “You look beautiful. Have you got your hammer in there somewhere?” 

He looked at her like a princess. She stood on her toes to kiss him, his hands on either side of her face.

He was wrong about her. A traitor, betrayer, a liar, she is. She went behind his back, let them convince her. “Alistair’s wishes are simply not possible,” Eamon said. He said, “You should consider the harm that could come to those most vulnerable,” and “Think of a ruler sympathetic to your people’s plight.” And she’d stood there helpless, out of her element. An idiot, jerked this way and that. At least Morrigan held up her end.

She calls Onion, who pouts, upset with her for leaving him on the ground. She is going home, burning collapsed buildings rolling by at the edge of her vision. Someone calls after her, but she’s too far away to turn back. There’s a crowd at the gate, a tangled red head bouncing through. Shianni scrambles towards her, shouting her name. Halsa hobbles on her bad knee, bracing for the impact, and she’s crushed in her arms, held. 

“We made it, we did it,” she shouts into the top of her head. Halsa sways, burying her face. Her knee is ready to give out, and Shianni is talking still. “...were so many of them, Maker I never saw-” Soris arrives behind her with a bandage wrapped around his face, “-but we fought back, like you said. I can’t believe-”

“Pup, you’re smushing her,” Soris peels them apart and pulls an arm around his shoulders. They stagger to her house, to her pa, who puts arms out to hold her up next. She laughs, thinking of them passing her around like an especially heavy baby, and then breaks into a sob on his chest.

They don’t ask questions. They probably don’t know how. Funny how she can’t explain anything that’s happened to her to anyone who wasn’t there. Funny how quickly it all goes back to ordinary, like having a dream that lasts lifetimes just to forget it before breakfast. The house looks the same as the day she left, except dustier. It’s weird sleeping in a bed; she moves to the floor after a while. For once her head is relatively quiet. No old gods screaming in her ears at the moment.

The knocks on the door start before the sun is up. Everyone wants to talk to her. Their kitchen is laden with dishes, more food than the three of them could possibly eat. Mrs. Grayling from two doors down, who once called her a rotten potato, brings them a quilt. Halsa settles on the steps outside the house, crippled for the moment, her knee throbbing swollen. 

There’s a lot to be done, and no one is coming to help, not here. Except there are humans about, she notices, suspicious. There’s a man helping sift through the wreckage of a burned house, and women herding stray children, and - Oghren. And Zevran, who sees her and waves. 

“You can’t be rid of us that easily,” he says as they approach.

“How did you even get in here?” she asks.

“Ask your boyfriend,” Oghren says.

He sent people to help. The King of Ferelden, a man of the people, is touring the city today. 

They stay, to her surprise. She thought Zevran would be long gone by now, but instead he helps Soris and Pa patch the roof. The kids are scared of Oghren until he makes faces at them and lets them climb on him. Leliana shows up after a while, and talks to Shianni for a long time. Wynne insists on healing Halsa’s knee.

It’s late in the afternoon, long after her arse has gone numb from waiting on the step, before he appears. He’s by himself, a hood pulled up over his head. He’s just Alistair right now.

“I think I’ve finally managed to shake my uncle,” he says, and the step creaks with their combined weight.

“He probably thinks you ran for the hills,”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.”

She glances at him from the corner of her eye. He looks as tired as she feels. “Thank you,” she says, “for sending people. For thinking of us.”

He shrugs. “For better or worse, Halsa, I am nearly always thinking of you.”

That hurts, a splash of acid. “I warned you about that, didn’t I?” she says.

“I do vaguely remember that.” 

“I didn’t mean for it to turn out like this,” she says. “I knew I’d be shit as a wife.”

He sputters, a weak laugh, “I’d like to say you weren’t, but…” A pause while he shifts forward to lean on his thighs. “Well, how did you expect it to turn out?”

“I’dunno,” she says to her knees, “I didn’t think about it.” 

“Halsa, you - you understand I’m stuck with this, right? For - I don’t know - til the moment I die? You really didn’t-”

“Alright,” she cuts him off. She can’t take another of these conversations. “I thought about it. And I thought about you, and me, and I thought one thing, then I thought another thing, and in the end, I thought it was for the best.”

She clears her throat and looks up at him. He’s not looking at her, or anything really. There’s a deep scratch on his cheek she didn’t notice before, and she wants to put her hand in the space next to it, to put both hands on his face and turn it towards hers like a child. She owes him an explanation, but when she opens her mouth only shit comes out.

“Look,” she starts again, “I know you don’t want it, but being rich and powerful and owning shit: that’s good. People want it. You know? I do too, but I can’t have it. But you can. And you don’t want it because you’re good and you don’t want to hurt people, but that’s _why_ you should get it. Because someone’s gonna get it anyway.”

She holds his gaze, searching for understanding. “You’re right, I suppose,” he says slowly. “But what happened to ‘fuck all them?’”

That’s what she said when he told her. He’d said what they wanted him to do, and she’d said, “Fuck all them. Fuck their throne. _I_ want you,” and she’d given him the ring. 

Now she sighs shaky, and says, “I don’t think it works that way. I can’t just ignore them. I have people to protect.”

“And I wasn’t one of them?”

“It’s not my fault who your father was,” she bristles, a wounded animal. “And I _did_. Like it or not, you’ll still be safe. You don’t know what it’s like here.”

He looks at her, and she knows she needs to tell him the story, the one she’s been avoiding. Nothing makes sense without it. Before, she told him she was conscripted after she killed a guy. Now she digs the guy up and puts the flesh back on his bones. She says out loud what he did, and what she did, and the scourge she feared would come down on all of them because of it.

He listens with a hand obscuring the lower half of his face. When she’s done, he says, muffled, “Maker. I thought it must be bad, but-”

“I should have told you,” she says.

“You should have,” he says, “but you had your reasons.” He shakes his head. “They really do that? Just come in and start killing people?”

“If they think they can get away with it.”

They sit for a moment in silence. Pa and Soris keep glancing at them from down the way, but she doesn’t care. She scoots closer to him, and feels his arm move around her. 

“I thought it was the right thing,” she says into his shoulder. “I didn’t want to.”

“I believe you.” He pulls her closer, tucks her head under his chin. “You’ve been honest with me, even when - well, even when you didn’t have to be.” 

He’s talking about Morrigan, the decision that will surely come back to haunt them. The last in a series of bad deals, of compromises.

“I’m sorry about that too,” she says. “I keep fucking things up by staying alive, don’t I?”

“No, come on,” he says. “The Wardens will need you, and anyway you can’t just leave me alone now.”

That’s a funny way to put it. Like as long as they’re both still living, they’re together. “How long do you have?” she asks.

“Before what, they marry me off?”

“I meant before your handler finds you, but both I guess.”

“Oh, Teagan’s been planning. It’ll happen soon.” That sucks the air from her, even after everything else. There’s nothing she can do now. “He was arguing with some advisor or aide or something when I left,” he continues, “I’m sure he’s noticed I’m gone by now.”

They’re running out of time. “Do you want to meet my family?” she says, surprising herself. 

She introduces him only as Alistair, but they know already. Soris and Shianni exchange amused glances; they’ll never let her hear the end of this.

A year and a half ago, no one could have told her about this. The King of Ferelden walking into the alienage and shaking her father’s hand, and telling him she’s the fiercest person he’s ever met. The letter she would get a week or so later addressed to “Warden Commander Tabris” with a map of the arling she’d been awarded. _p.s. Owning things and having power - would you like to try it?_ None of it would have made sense. She’s still not sure it makes sense.

“Will you come to my wedding?” he asks as she walks him out.

She almost says no, she’s already made quite an enemy of his bride, but he’s asking like it’s a favor. “You want me to?” 

“Yes.” He embraces her at the gate, kisses her forehead and says, “I’d like to see my wife there.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, thanks for reading. Follow me on Tumblr if you want to hear me talk about Dragon Age https://www.tumblr.com/blog/gothkimmyschmidt


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